Word Made Flesh

23

The Toth Care Facility is a collection of turn- of-the-century buildings hooked together by a highly imaginative series of eclectically designed additions. It sits on the crest of a hill, originally the bloated estate of Vartan Toth, a notorious local industrialist and land baron whose life story now serves as a kind of archetypal blueprint for success among Quinsigamond’s Turkish community.

Originally from the Taurus Mountains region, descendant of a tent-dwelling family of transhumant goat herders, and, occasionally, opium smugglers, Toth came to the States as a teen and flailed away at the national dream of the limitless wealth and independence available to any and all who would will aspiration into currency and power. He made his first investment stash before he was twenty, working the racetrack circuit up and down the East Coast, buying, selling, and betting on horseflesh until he was able to establish a many-tiered bookmaking franchise. But he parlayed this initial wad into a truly grotesque bounty by devising a more efficient way of transforming slaughtered horse bone and muscle into a tremendously binding industrial adhesive. Almost overnight, Toth was elevated from a rough-and-tumble pony banker into a glue magnate worthy of taking brandy with the stuffy and inbred patrons of the Quinsigamond Men’s Club. And though the legend that still resounds along Arcadian Way tends to delete the fact, it was at the height of his much-blessed life that Toth plummeted into scandal and tragedy.

A gambler and womanizer during his young manhood, Toth felt the synchronistic sting of karma when, at the ripe age of fifty, he took a beautiful, if high-strung, child bride named Cissy, the daughter of a socially prominent Episcopal minister. During the honeymoon, on Toth’s first and last trip back home to his native Turkey, his new wife suffered an irreversible psychotic breakdown and mutilated a ceremonial minstrel in midperformance using the sterling cake knife from her nuptial reception. The herdsmen of the southeastern valleys are well-known for the swiftness and brutality of their justice system and, as the bride-groom watched helplessly, Cissy was torn to shreds by wild boar and rabid jackal.

Unhinged by this tragedy, Toth returned to America and began attempting to reverse a lifetime of avarice and decadence. He devoted himself to funding the burgeoning field of mental health research. Back in Quinsigamond, he moved into a gardener’s cottage on his own estate and turned the main houses over to Dr. Renfield Hulbert, a peer and longtime, if one-sided, correspondent of both Freud and Jung whom fate has seen fit to designate to careless footnotes in dense technical histories of the period. Hulbert may well have been a profit- and ego-driven charlatan, but this does not necessarily negate the fact that he was possessed of a complex and highly flexible intelligence. And if it was later proven that the bulk of his medical credentials were either invented or at some point revoked, nevertheless his papers regarding the connections between schizophrenia (then termed persistent fantasia by Dr. H) and the mechanics of the brain’s language centers (then termed the alphabetical gears by Dr. H) were genuinely ahead of their time.

During the Roaring Twenties, while much of the nation’s upper crust Charlestoned their way toward the lurking Depression of the decade’s end, the hysterical and the delusional and the dangerously unbalanced, the brothers and sisters who roared for less ribald and more torturous reasons, were brought to the Toth Clinic where their concerned but inconvenienced families were given a tour that included the elegantly appointed splendors of the estate but excluded the snake-pit horrors of the basement workrooms, dingy and exceptionally unhygienic laboratories where every manner of fanatical quackery was practiced from hypothermia-producing ice-water therapies to radical and sloppy experimental lobotomies to a veritable smorgasbord of pharmacological remedies not far removed, but likely much deadlier, than those found in medieval witches’ breviaries.

Hulbert’s favorite innovation, however, was very likely trepanning. The doctor drilled a hole in just about every skull he got his hands on and ultimately it was his undoing. When the wife of Quinsigamond’s only impeached mayor sought the help of the Toth Clinic for a series of migraines that coincided with her husband’s political downfall, the woman was sent home, over the protests of Hulbert’s loyal if equally sadistic staff, with a crater in her forehead the size of a Prussian monocle. The ex-mayor seized on the defacement as a diversionary tool, excoriating the local paper for spreading lies about his finances rather than looking into the medical horrors being perpetrated right under our noses. The wags on the city desk responded that, in fact, it appeared the horrors were just under our hairlines, but The Spy’s publisher smelled a good smear story and, with the purchased resources of the accommodating police chief, raided the Toth Clinic pronto.

Some pioneers of the shock school of photojournalism were on hand when a carefully picked team of Q-town’s most roguish street bulls kicked open the doors of the asylum. To this day in the files of the Historical Museum one can view sepia testaments to the kind of heart-crushing torture one mad scientist can single-handedly invent — pictures of medical procedures to make a Nazi jealous, brains split open like melons and subjected to humiliations beyond the scope of Sade himself, close-up portraits of strange metal instruments whose purposes could not include anything in the realm of the benign, representations of human beings whose mental illness was only the starting point for a descent into a bottomless hell devised by a first-class maniac with access to money, manpower, and electricity. When the cellars of the Toth Estate were finally aired out, the city was scandalized and mortified by the dirty but not-so-little secrets that Dr. Hulbert, led away in cuffs and sporting two bloody lips, called “my life’s work.”

The clinic was closed down temporarily. Vartan Toth remained on the estate, a recluse who spent his hours reading the Bible in his shanty home, tending to a garden, lighting icons to his lost but still-beloved Cissy. One rumor proposed that the glue baron himself had been subjected to a few of the doctor’s less than delicate treatments. But it was more likely plain grief and regret that did in the Turk. When he eventually lost all his business interests in the crash of ’29, he either didn’t care or didn’t understand the consequences. The city ended up burdened with the estate-cum-asylum and Toth died a few years later, living in a storefront mission, brokenhearted and unhinged right to the end. They say his last words were “My darling, the beasts have finally turned on me.”

When a private medical co-op from Toronto purchased and reopened the clinic many years later, they decided, for some determinedly wrongheaded reason, to retain the original name. But the Toth facility has, of late, built a fairly respectable reputation as a rehabilitation center for most of the common modern addictions. Another few years of vacation stays by rock stars and movie princesses and the board of directors is convinced they’ll have erased all memory of the hospital’s unfortunate history. And if alumni donations keep rolling in at the current rate, the place may throw itself up on the big board, go public, and break ground for a new wing. Every new jones to hit the street is money in the Keogh plan. As Dr. Raglan said at the most recent management team meeting, “Rest easy, kids. There’s no shortage of monkeys on this horizon.”

But if the compulsive self-destructiveness of the pampered end of the societal spectrum is the mainstay of Toth, the clinic continues to handle a smattering of more complex and severe pathologies, if only to maintain a standing in the field and earn an infrequent mention in the academic journals. Still, as Gilrein parks the Checker in the visitors’ lot and walks the hill to the main hall, he tries to imagine how the Toth’s regime of ardent group therapy sessions and mandatory janitorial service could possibly help Otto Langer.

The reception area of the main hall is a showpiece of Victorian gentility. Gilrein finds the front desk and wastes close to ten minutes arguing with a preppy and arrogant intern who continues to repeat that the patient is under sedation and receiving no visitors. Gilrein brooks the refusal politely but when he realizes the futility of manners in this instance, he turns on his cop demeanor, gives a flash of gun, and asks the kid if he’d like to wake Dr. Raglan and inquire if the boss could join them at the pharmacy where a small army of narcotics officers would like to compare the stockroom supply with the dispensing logs.

The intern asks a floor-mopping orderly to watch the front desk, grabs a huge set of keys from a drawer and leads the way to the stairwell. When it becomes apparent that they’re headed for the cellar, Gilrein says, “I thought they didn’t use this part of the hospital anymore.”

“Restraint cases,” the intern explains, opening and then resecuring a series of steel fire doors that segment a long, dim corridor permeated with the alcohol stink of some harsh, overused disinfectant. “We try to keep the shriekers here until we can quiet them down. It’s very disturbing to the other guests.”

“Guests,” Gilrein repeats.

The intern ignores him and they turn down a hallway, open another door, and come to a square foyer of concrete walls where an enormous black man in a brown security outfit is sitting at a desk reading a tabloid, engrossed in a cover story whose title informs FLESH-EATING ALIEN MICROBES INFECT ASIA.

“Larry,” the intern says to the guard who continues to read, “give this man clearance to room D.”

Larry nods, takes one hand from the paper to reveal a subhead — VIRUS HEADED FOR AMERICA — and presses a lock-release under the lip of the desk. A buzzing noise fills the room. The intern turns and exits the foyer without a word. Gilrein grabs the inner door and pulls it open, surprised by its weight. He steps inside and lets the door swing closed behind him. The sound outside is instantly muffled but the buzzing continues for several seconds.

He’s at the end of another corridor, this one much narrower and maybe only thirty feet long. One wall is a series of limestone blocks that give off a faint sparkle from the overhead cone lamps. The interior, facing wall is a series of four identical, consecutive cells — simple, tiny squares of limestone enclosed by an iron-bar wall. They look almost identical to pictures Gilrein has seen of the cell rooms in Alcatraz. They’re outfitted with gray metal cots topped by thin, roll-out mattresses. In the right-hand corner of each cell is a seatless toilet. If anything, the disinfectant smell is even stronger in here, harsh enough to burn your eyes or make you gag. The first three cells are empty. They’re distinguished by the letters A, B, and C stencil-painted on the floor in front of their doors.

Gilrein walks the length of the corridor until he gets to cell D and he looks in on a diorama that could rival anything Dr. Hulbert created almost a century ago. Otto Langer is naked, his shoulders covered by a filthy woolen blanket. He’s huddled on the floor in the center of the cell, emitting a kind of whimpering sound, a noise the runt puppy might make when separated from its mother for the first time. Langer’s face is an abstract expressionist canvas of blue welts and dried blood and fresh blood and matted hair and maybe even some fecal matter spread across a cheek. The cot is turned on its side. The mattress is half-shredded. On the rear wall of the cell, staring out at Gilrein like a minimalist billboard, is a four-letter graffito, painted in what may or may not be Langer’s own blood. It’s a message that appears to be a word, but is not—METH.

And in a rear corner of the cell, suspended in midair, hanging by the neck from a belt secured to a rusted, dripping water pipe, is the ventriloquial dummy, Zwack the golem.

Gilrein goes down on one knee and positions himself in line with Langer’s face.

“Otto,” he calls out, his voice an intrusion into the rhythm of his friend’s keening.

Langer looks up at him, but the eyes seem unfocused, as if he had heard his own name but can’t locate the source of the noise.

“It’s Gilrein,” he says.

Langer lifts his head, cranes it out on the neck, peers out of the cell, suspicious but cut by a drug glaze.

“What the hell happened, Otto?” Gilrein asks. “Where’s Jocasta?”

Langer just shakes his head, but then he gets down on all fours and crawls over to the bars. He brings his mouth to an opening, signals with his fingers for Gilrein to come closer. Gilrein leans in and hears Langer whisper, “Go away,” then notices the fingers are covered with tiny crisscrossing cuts and scrapes, as if Langer had punched his hands through a window or had them attacked by small kittens or birds.

Gilrein stands up and says, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

And immediately, Langer is on his feet as well, screaming, “No, get out, go away, get out,” hysterical, clutching at the bars and ramming his forehead into them as he yells.

Gilrein is close to panicking. He doesn’t know whether he wants or fears the arrival of Larry the security guard. He steps back from the cell and holds his hands up in a placating gesture, saying, “Okay, all right, I’m going, I’m leaving.” He shakes his head at Langer, turns, and starts to move for the exit.

And from the cell he hears, in a clear and focused voice, “This is all your fault, Gilrein.”

He stops in front of restraining chamber A, turns around, but doesn’t walk back to Langer’s cell.

“How is this my fault?” he asks.

“You and your filthy errands,” Langer says, not in a yell or a whisper, but at a conversational level. And full of hatred.

“What errands?” but he knows.

There’s no response from Langer.

“You’re talking about Tani,” Gilrein says. “You’re talking about me driving Leo Tani around.”

A pause and then, “You think you’re innocent, don’t you, Gilrein? You think you’re a victim of God, don’t you, you bastard?”

Gilrein walks back to Langer’s cage and stares at the old man, leaving a few feet between them.

Langer’s accent comes out thick and purposeful.

“There’s blood all over your hands, you son of a bitch.”

Before Gilrein can think of how to respond, he sees Langer reach down and position his penis through the bars and begin to piss in his visitor’s direction. Urine hits the bottom of Gilrein’s pant leg and his shoes before he can step back. It’s a weak stream and the arc dissipates rapidly, the casualty of restraining drugs or an enlarged prostate.

“Jesus,” Gilrein yells, watching the puddle form on the floor. Then the anger comes and he adds, “You can stay here and wallow in your own shit, you crazy bastard.”

“I deserve,” Langer says, “nothing less.”

It’s a cryptic enough shift to make Gilrein linger, and he watches as Langer seems to sway under his own weight, sinking to the floor in a half-controlled, slow-motion collapse and dissolving into a melted lotus position. He brings his hands to the bars and pulls his face forward until his mouth and nose poke out of the cell.

“If you stay,” he says to Gilrein without looking up, “you will be infected.”

Gilrein thinks for a minute that he’s referring to St. Leon’s Grippe, but Langer has none of the symptoms — no pustules on the tongue, no difficulty speaking.

“Infected with what?” as he gets down on the floor, campfire style, directly opposite Langer’s face and carefully avoiding the pool of urine.

“With what?” the voice now aggravatingly low. “With the story.”

“Which story?”

“The only one that’s left to me.”

A pause as they stare at each other. Then Gilrein asks, “Could you tell it to me?”

“Are you sure you want to hear?”

And though he’s not at all sure, Gilrein nods his assent.